The idea of substituting the traditional «philosophy of
words» for a "philosophy of works" was already present in the mind of
Francis Bacon when he was still a youngster: «When I was still in college,

99 100 Francis Bacon: from magic to science

around sixteen years of age, I had for the first time a
feeling of rejection (as the honourable Member was pleased to tell me) towards
the philosophy of Aristotle; a feeling that was not caused by contempt for the
author whom I always worshipped and praised, but by the inefficiency of the method; For it was (as the
honourable Member used to say) a philosophy that was only suitable for disputes
and controversies but sterile in the profitable works for the life of Man...
" "Bacon," continues the biographer William Rawley —“remained faithful to this judgement until
the day he died. " (Rossi, Francis Bacon)

The
dissolution of Cartesian rationalism must be placed in the context of the
fallacious juxtaposing of philosophy as the pursuit of knowledge as wisdom and of
science as the degradation of philosophy into the instrumental pursuit of
knowledge as power and domination. This corruption of philosophy as critique of
human praxes such as the one stultifyingly called “science” can be traced in
part back to the evident apories and antinomies into which Cartesianism ran and
therefore to its inability to bridge the theoretical chasm between the rescogitans
(mind) and the resextensa (world). But the source of this
inability – the separation (chorismos)
of mind and matter – was not purely theoretical:
it was above all social in origin.
Descartes and his philosophy represented a social order tied to absolutist
states founded on the feudal economy and closely aligned with the Catholic
church. This social order relied on fundamental tenets that Descartes and most
of his contemporaries could not challenge intellectually, let alone
politically. The first tenet was the undisputed and indisputable supremacy of
religion in all human reality – and therefore the categorical pre-eminence of
the spiritual over the mundane. The second, a corollary of the first, was the
superiority of intellectual reasoning over manual labour and other practical
pursuits – of philosophy and logic over technology and science.

Clearly,
these two tenets implied also the overwhelming dominance of logico-deductive
“knowledge” over technico-scientific “doing”. And this is precisely what the
rise of the capitalist bourgeoisie in Europe overturned. The political essence
of capitalism is the subjugation of human living labour through its fictitious
“exchange” with objectified dead labour – leading to the easier reproduction of
the working population on an expanding scale – leading in turn to overpopulation
and the systematic destruction of the ecosphere. The abstract introspective and abstrusely speculative bent of the old “knowledge”
or gnosis – epitomized by and
encapsulated in Augustine’s “in interiore
homine habitat veritas” – sought indeed to preserve the original telos of
philosophy as the love of wisdom, as the pursuit of the good life expounded primordially
by Socrates in Plato’s dialogues. In this specific context, its political goal
for humanity was indeed rational in a substantive sense and capable of leading
to a rational human society in balanced and sustainable coexistence with its
environment.

In
its distorted Judaeo-Christian, Aristotelian and Scholastic versions, however, this
“knowledge” could not but vacillate and retreat in the face of the broad social
transformations coinciding with the rise of capitalist industry during the
Renaissance. This “knowledge” (or the Scholastic gnosis, or sapience, or the
Hellenic episteme) confused “truth” with the “certainty” of a priori logico-mathematical deduction
and had the nefarious consequence of stifling empirical research and experimentation
leading instead to practico-technical stagnation – in line with the interests
of absolutist theocracies that relied for their stability on the rigidity of
the feudal socio-economic and political hierarchy founded on land ownership. With
the rapid expansion of capitalist manufacturing industry and the concomitant
cataclysmic social transformations it occasioned – not just the humanist
Renaissance, but also the religious Reformation -, there were irrepressible
socio-economic forces associated with “doing” that needed to assert their
expanding socio-economic power into the more overtly political activities
associated with the old “knowledge” – and could so expand only by intruding on
the old Scholastic gnosis of the
theosophical absolutist feudal order.

It
is the very ‘fixity’ of Scholastic truth that seals its ineffectuality, its
untruth, its “sterility”, because it denies that human understanding has a
history related to “the changing needs” of humanity. The reality of “need” is
what confirms the limitations of our knowledge and our need for “doing”, as
well as our subjection to the “laws” of nature. And it is against this Scholastic abuse of
logico-mathematics, and particularly of the syllogism as the quintessential tool for the advancement of learning –
this rhetorical swindle, this Eskamotage
based on empty tautologies - that the sharpest bourgeois proponents of the new Scientia inveniendi (Francis Bacon and
Thomas Hobbes) rile, basing themselves on the defiantly empirical-inductive
practices of the burgeoning capitalist manufacturing industries that will soon
transform the face of the Earth.

Cartesian
rationalism starts with the imprescindible postulate of the existence of God,
from which all other “truths” and “sciences” can be derived logico-deductively
through the quasi-divine power of Reason. Thence follows the necessary
transcendental link between God and the soul, the soul and the mind – all of
which, as spiritual entities, seal the rule of the res cogitans, of the Spirit or Reason, over the res extensa or Nature. The Subject rules
over the Object, and therefore logico-deduction rules over empirical induction.
The medium of this cosmological order, of this Reason, is language because reasoning is done exclusively through
language. But this language of reasoning, Latin as learned Scholastic language
used in logic and theology and law, was increasingly divorced from the menial
tasks of rising manufacturing industry that owed its expansion in large part
now to the experimental “doing” of producers. The preferred, the essential,
indeed perhaps the only tool of the old gnosis was the syllogism and the
associated science of rhetoric – which is the most certain, irrefutable source
of “truth”, seen as “certainty” derived from analytical deduction.

XIV.
The syllogism consists of propositions; propositions of words; words are the
signs of notions. If, therefore, the notions (which form the basis of the
whole) be confused and carelessly abstracted from things, there is no solidity
on the superstructure. Our only hope, then, is in the induction. (F. Bacon, Novum
Organum.)

Despite
Descartes’s own mechanicist turn, even
Renaissance thought, to which he undeniably belonged, was still constrained and
restrained by the theocratic and theological perception that human knowledge
has insight into divine omniscience and certainty. The ability of humans to
understand – indeed, to decipher - Reality, places humans at the very centre of
the universe next to the Divinity. In this sense, the early theoreticians of
the scientific method represent the apogee of Renaissance humanism.If indeed it is possible for humans “to
read” what Galileo and Descartes called “the great book of the universe”, then
it is impossible to see how this grand “great book” can ever change, given that
presumably it has been written by the Divinity with eternity in mind! After
all, the novel theories of science coming out of the Renaissance were founded
on the inertia of mechanical motion
(Galileo, Newton) and on the conservation
of mass and energy (Lavoisier, Mayer). The inescapable corollary to this
necessarily deterministic vision of the cosmos is that, quite apart from
“understanding” Nature, human beings are thereby unable to transform it by
acting upon it. Hence, human beings are entitled to act upon Nature solely in an effort to understand it –
and thereby elevate themselves to the passive status of mortal gods in terms of
humanizing their environment. Homo homini
deus. Human activity does not change the universe, it does not create but
only transforms, because this activity is itself purely physical in nature –
and so measurable and calculable. Renaissance
thought, Descartes included, still sees knowledge purely as the gathering of
wisdom, and scientific research as the quest for divine enlightenment. The
practical applications to which this knowledge could be put were not the main
object of early scientific research and experimentation. Indeed, even as late
as Mach, at the threshold of the 20th Century, “pure”,
dis-interested, dis-passionate scientific research occupied a different circle
of the scientific empyrean from its “applied” engineering counterpart.

At
the beginning of the bourgeois era, the mischievous misapprehension takes hold that
philosophy and the instrumental activity universally known as “science” are
merely different stages of a singleprocess known as the acquisition of
knowledge or, in the title of Francis Bacon’s magnum opus, “the advancement of
learning”, where knowledge and learning are understood as power and dominion over
an indomitable nature extrinsic and
alien to humans. In this perspective, science and philosophy have the same
homogeneous object: - that is, the pursuit of knowledge as power and domination
by human beings over the life-world and, per
extenso, over one another.

Gradually, however, an epochal revolution
takes place in the theorization of humanity’s place in the life-world and in
the approach to scientific research from pure observation of natural
occurrences to the artificial reproduction of events. (Cf. Rossi, Birth, Intro.) Science now comes to be seen as the pursuit of
universal goals by instrumental means – through induction and manipulation or
experimentation where the creation of an artificial environment goes hand in hand with
establishing the “validity” or “success” of “scientific experiments and
discoveries”! Far from being mere observation, science now becomes an
infinite insatiable quest to transform and manipulate the life-world –
including the human body!

Yet
what we call “science” is not an independent sphere or dimension of human
knowledge understood as an innate intellectual and cerebral faculty – the way
logico-mathematics or music and art are. Instead, as we seek to illustrate
historically here, science is simply “technique” (techne’ as against episteme
or indeed poiesis). Nor is science a
“technical-neutral” dimension of human action whose “truth” is independent of
human social relations and practical goals. In sum, “science” is a non-entity;
scientific methodology is a mirage pure and simple.

To be
sure, Cartesianism represented already a significant departure from the
Scholastic gnosis prevalent in feudal
society. As we saw earlier, Descartes had been forced to indicate (to point to) the “methods” adopted by the
manufacturing, artisanal crafts as the blueprint for his own
philosophic-scientific method, - not, indeed, as an illustration of the theoretical foundation for such a method, but precisely because it became clear to
him that no such foundation was exactly definable or even theoretically possible! In seeking to theorize his scientific
method by reference to the mechanical
tasks of the burgeoning manufacturing industry necessitated by the new
bourgeois-capitalist industrial order, Descartes effectively demonstrates that
“doing” (practical-technical behavior based on social relations) precedes not
just the old “knowledge” of the Hellenic and feudal orders, but also the
“knowing” (“science”) of the humanist Renaissance in the sense that all
“knowing” is merely the rationalization
of social relations of production.

Our
method…resembles the procedures in the mechanical crafts, which have no need of methods
other than their own, and which supply their own instructions for
making their own tools. If, for example, someone wanted to practise one of
these crafts…but did not possess any of the tools, he would be forced at first
to use a hard stone…as an anvil, to make a rock do as a hammer, to make a pair
of tongs out of wood…Thus equipped, he would not immediately attempt to forge
swords, helmets, or other iron implements for others to use; rather, he would
first of all make hammers, an anvil, tongs and other tools for his own use (Rules).

It is
certainly true that early bourgeois natural philosophers like Bacon highlighted
the importance of the artisanal and mechanical activities: yet, it is also true
that they did so only to stress the need for human learning to change
methodology from logico-mathematical speculation (“the philosophy of words”) to
technical-scientific re-search and dis-covery
(“the philosophy of work”): here the emphasis is still laid heavily on the philosophical aspect of this “search and
discovery”, not on its practical industrial
applications. The emphasis has certainly shifted from thought (meta-physics) to
nature (physics) – but the dignity of the search is rescued in the phrase
“natural philosophy” with which early bourgeois science sought to identify itself.
Bacon merely promotes the imitation of the methods of industry, of their
productivity, but does not equate science
with industry!

At the centre of the new science there is a hard core of
quasi-Pyrrhonic scepticism (cf. R. Popkin, The
History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza). The abandonment of Latin in
favour of national languages, already advocated by Cusanus (cf. E. Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos), to eschew “the idols of the market” – meaning the stifling
orthodoxy of theocratic Scholastic and Aristotelian learning endorsed by
absolutist monarchies –, is a constant theme in the rising “scientific” literature
of the late Renaissance. The danger to guard against here is posed by the crystallization of prejudices in words
and languages in the sense that, far from being shaped by experience, words and
language filter and shape our experience of reality, con-ditioning (setting the direction and boundaries for) our
empirical research or practico-technical activity.

LIX. The idols of the market [idola fori]are the most
troublesome of all, namely those which have entwined themselves round the
understanding from the associations of words and names. For men imagine that their reason
governs words, while, in fact, words react upon the understanding;and
this has rendered philosophy and the sciences sophistical and inactive. Words
are generally formed in a popular sense, and define things by those broad lines
which are most obvious to the vulgar mind; but when a more acute
understanding…is anxious to vary those lines, and to adapt them more accurately
to nature, words oppose it.

In other words, as early as the sixteenth century, even earlier
than Descartes, Bacon understands the intrinsic epistemological nexus between
language and “reality”, and the socio-economic interaction of language and
social structure in shaping and directing scientific activity. And he understands
that this language (Latin) has to change to accommodate changes brought about
by empiric-inductive discoveries connected to the rising manufacturing
industry. It is both intriguing and revealing that Bacon should refer to this
“conventional wisdom” (Marx’s and Nietzsche’s “crystallization”, Lukacs’s
“reification”) with the phrase “the idols of the market” – because, in effect,
Bacon is actually emphasizing the importance of the inductive-empirical
approach of the new manufacturing industries – which, of course, rely on “the
market” – against the most obvious opponents of this “market”, that is, the
Latin-speaking theocratic and monarchic establishment. It is obvious that already (!) from the dawn of capitalist
industry and its “marketplace society” Bacon identifies “society” – even the
feudal absolutist society preceding capitalist manufacturing industry (!) -
entirely with “the market”, rather than with a “community”, a civil society or
a status civilis that are prior to
and even independent of and different from “the market mechanism”.

Bacon, then, fails to distinguish between, on one side, the
moribund theocratic-absolutist mediaeval order which had the vice of abusing
empty terminology or nomenclature and derivative syllogisms, to the detriment
of practical empirical-inductive “research” – and on the other side, the
“market society” that is the real social carrier of the artisanal crafts that
he is championing. Bacon wholly fails to see the strict nexus between
capitalist industry and his “new organon” because he mistakenly sees the two
activities – manufacturing industry and mechanical experimentation (“scientific
research”) - as separate, distinct human activities.

nature)andseesinthemtheabilitytoproduceinventions andworksthatlacked
traditionalknowledge,orwhen,polemicizingagainstthesterility
ofscholasticlogic, he projectsahistoryoftheartsandtechniquesas an indispensable
preconditiontoachieveareformofknowledgeandhumanlife. In fact, inBacon's worktheprotestagainstthe"sterility"oftraditionalcultureisfoundedonthe
insistenceontheprogressthatcharacterizes
themechanicalartsthat,
unlikephilosophyandintellectualsciences,arenotworshipped
asmost
perfect sculptures,butarealwaysshown to be sovitalthat they cangofromnothavingshapetobeingmoreandmoreperfectinrelationtothechangingneedsofthehumanspecies.Thisiswhathappened,accordingtoBacon,inthedevelopmentsofartillery,navigationand printing; He believes that the main cause
of this progress is that many talents collaborated in achieving a single
purpose. In the mechanical arts there is no place for the
"dictatorial" power of a single individual but only a
"senatorial" power that requires in no case that his followers
renounce their own freedom to become perpetual slaves of a single person. Thus,
time is in favor of the arts and instead contributes to the destruction of the
initially perfect buildings that the philosophers built.

Knowledge-as-power or “doing” and tools

In this precise regard, and at this crucial historical juncture,
the
all-important epochal transformation in the mode of thinking that Francis Bacon
brings to renaissance thought, and then to technical-scientific practice, - the
transition from knowledge as the path
towisdom, on one hand, and
knowing as the acquisition and
accumulation of material power – is given just and timely emphasis by
Rossi in his distinctive compendious fashion:

I have already had occasion to underline how in Baconthe
adherence to the "mystical" aspects of the metaphysical vision of
reality that was linked to the investigations of magic or alchemyis either not highlighted or is simply
irrelevant. What he accepts from the magic tradition
is the conception of knowledge
as power and ofa science [by means of which man] becomes a minister of nature to prolong its work and take it to full realization, and through which, finally, manseeks to become the owner of reality and put it,
almost by cunning and through continual struggle, to the service of man.78

I. Man, as
the minister and interpreter of nature, does and understands as much as his
observations on the order of nature, either with regard to things or the mind,
permit him, and neither knows nor is capable of more.

III.
Knowledge and human power are synonymous, since the ignorance of the cause
frustrates the effect…

Bacon’s
new organon (Novum Organum) is distinct from the old deductive and sterile,
barren and effete gnosis or sapience of Antiquity and of feudal
times in that it is based (a) on “observations” and (b) on practical tools or instruments
as against the sterile syllogism and (c) on the division of labour. Bacon’s
“new organon” is not a stagnant and sterile mode of knowledge but much rather
an aggressively productive one, one
militantly aligned with the socio-political and economic needs of bulging
capitalist interests. With Francis Bacon we find the earliest refusal of the static,
sterile, unchanging character of Nature (“nature free”), to privilege the
action of humans in its transformation (not creation! What he called “nature bound”). An “accidental” effect, an epiphenomenon, a mere “incident” or
“co-incidence” is mere contingence – it does not form part of an infinitely
repeatable experiment – and therefore it does not confer “power”. Power is the
ability to obtain an “effect” with certainty – a “result” (the German word is
“Erfolg”, success, esito in Italian).
If knowledge is power, then power over nature is the defining moment of what
the bourgeois era presents to us as “science”. But science – and therefore all
“knowledge” – are defined in this industrial productive light: whatever can be
produced indefinitely and infinitely for the purpose of endless capitalist accumulation
– endless dominion over “nature”. What these new, unprecedentedly powerful
social relations of production were – nothing less than the epochal emergence
of capitalist society – is something that neither Descartes nor Francis Bacon
could suspect, let alone comprehend, in their time: nevertheless, their
pioneering opening to scientific enterprise and their theorization of the
scientific method, however fallacious, is central to the understanding of the
nascent bourgeois society that has characterized human history since then

LI.
The human understanding is, by its own nature, prone to abstraction, and
supposes that which is fluctuating to be fixed.

The
idea of man as a creature devoid of [separate from] nature, who can give
himself the nature he desires, is one of the central themes of the philosophy
of the Renaissance that we can find — to cite only two names — in Pico and
Bovillus. But such an idea is
substantially alien to Bacon's thought. The power of man is in no way
infinite: It is obsessus legibus naturae
and no human force can break down the causal links that regulate natural
reality 66. The duty of man is therefore not to celebrate his infinite freedom
or to maintain his essential identity with

1.The mechanical arts, the magic and the Science 69

the whole, but to realise that the empowerment
of the limited endowments of man demands an adaptation to nature and the will
to follow its mandates and to continue its task. Only this willingness to adapt
can allow for a real and non-illusory authority over nature. Man becomes the
owner of Nature only when he himself is minister and interpreter of that
nature; That is why the human pretension to penetrate the senses and reason in
the realm of the divine is dangerous and is devoid of meaning; so the
possibility of an operatio libera in
naturedoes not mean at all that you can perform all the
operations that are sought by man, but that those operations of transformation
that comply with natural laws and become like an extension of the work ofnature will never find limits 67. Only taking
into account this Baconian conception of the situation of man in the world can
be clear the Baconian concept of science and find justification for Bacon's
interest in the objectivity of ethical life, his passion for physiognomy and the
art of success Staff and their sympathies towards Machiavelli's naturalism.

Hence,
the laws of nature, though fixed, are as infinite as there are combinations of
atoms in the world – which is why humans will never acquire quasi-divine,
definitive knowledge
(“knowledge-as-omniscience”) but rather will be confined to incessant knowing (“knowledge-as-power”, unlimited
production and accumulation of wealth) – as ministers and interpreters of
nature. For Bacon, a fixed definitive,
omniscient science (knowledge) such as the one sought by early Renaissance
scientists would be no science at all because no further scientific activity
would be possible. Science would cease to have a history (Bacon was a keen
historian): once we know all the laws of nature that determine it, no further
“action” is possible – including scientific research - because the “actor” is
strictly aware of all the causes and all the effects of that action ab aeternitate. Put differently, our
absolute awareness of the “action” would nullify our awareness of it as action (Latin, ago, agere, actus, to initiate) and so activity would turn into mere mechanism. No life would be possible! (Cf. Heidegger’s erroneous insistence on
“thought” instead of “life”, albeit compensated by his ubiquitous concern with
Being.)

IV. Man
while operating can only apply or withdraw natural bodies; nature internally
performs the rest.

For
“nature” to be able “internally to
supply the rest”, it is obvious that human beings cannot dictate to nature but
must be subject to its “laws”. And for humans to be subject to natural laws,
our understanding of these laws must be limited and indefinite so that there
can never be an end to experimentation. The fallacy of Renaissance science as
well as alchemy was to think that it could unlock the workings of nature, that
it could find the clavis universalis
in keeping with the quasi-divine status of the human spirit. But if, as Bacon
contends, the laws of nature are indefinite and the outcomes of scientific
discovery infinite as the combinations of atoms, how do we know that there are laws of nature?A historical science (knowing) can never be differentiated from doing – and thus it becomes mere conjecture, a pro-ject, a hypothesis
- not science in the sense of a body of
definite and definitive, objective rules or laws of nature. (A similar
conclusion was reached earlier by Cusanus with his notion of conjecture, see E.
Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos.) If,
as Bacon rightly asserts (echoed much later by Max Weber), the laws of nature
are infinite, then they become indefinite: they are no longer laws but purely conventional guides to
or tools for actions that humans take consciously in directions they choose!
(For instance, if we chose to ignore the outcomes of certain experiments [that
is, some “laws of nature”], we would then revert to a different conduct or
approach to that “nature”. The experimental results are not “objective” or
“real” separately from the interests and or activity that led us to conduct
those specific experiments – which is why Italians correctly call an experiment
“esperienza” - experience]. Plato’s “noble lie”, considered afresh from this
perspective, reveals the aleatory, makeshift, and conventional basis of
technical-scientific re-search and dis-coveries and in-ventions. All of these
terms indicate the “active” deontological, as against ontological, origin of
“scientific truth” – which is quite obviously a praxis, a verum-factum.)

At least four elements emerge from Bacon’s
postulates: first, Truth, or objective reality or nature, exists. But Truth
cannot be determined with finality by human beings; it is an ever-receding
unreachable horizon that can be sought but not attained. The aim of learning is
to adopt a method that prioritizes discovery as against transmission of
knowledge – again, productive, powerful knowledge as against learning as wisdom
and its transmission.

Second, human beings are now subject to and not the subject of natural laws or of nature – hence, the
anthropocentrism of Renaissance humanism is thoroughly confuted and jettisoned.
This marks the beginning of nihilism (Nietzsche,Heidegger).

Third, human beings can transform natural
elements, not laws, to suit their needs through the instruments of method
(observation/induction) and tools: but in so doing humans themselves become
tools in this acquisition of power, not over nature but over one another!

Fourth, henceforth, human beings do not limit
themselves only to observing nature but can also set up artificial experiments
to impute and impose “laws of nature” to and on this nature itself!

Science,suchasBaconconceives
it,mustleavetheterrainof uncontrolled
individualgenius,randomness,arbitraryandabruptsynthesis,andwork
instead by basing itselfonan
experimentalism builtnotexanalogia
hominisbutexanalogia universi,foundedontheknowledgeoftheinstrumentalnatureofcognitivefaculties.Inacultureofthiskindthereisnoplaceforareasonable to achieve,byitself,therationaltruth.ThetruthispresentedasanidealtoachieveandBaconwants a logic that serves as a new
scientific method that serves precisely
as theinstrumentofconquestofnewtruths,not as themeansoftransmissionoftruths
alreadyachieved.Therejection
of the "contentious"knowledgeofScholasticism wantedtoexpresspreciselythislittleinterestofBaconinthetruths
oftransmission.
(Rossi, ibid.)

Bacon
fails to understand that the very admonishments and objections he moves against
the old Scholastic learning, against hermeticism as well as the new science of
the Renaissance - that they mistakenly assume that humans are not subject to
natural laws due to their spiritual affinity with the Divinity - would be
objectively impossible to make if indeed, as he contends, human beings were
subject to such “objective laws of nature” - because then it would not be
possible for humans to be conscious of such laws! The existence of objective
laws of nature makes human awareness of
them objectively untenable! It would
require the existence of an Archimedean point – a vantage point outside the
cosmos – that is impossible ex hypothesi!
All “scientific laws” are theories – and the essence of theory is that the
theoretician is within, not without, the cosmos that is being
theorized. No theory can com-prehend its
object. I cannot be aware or think of laws that govern my thinking because the
existence of such objective laws would nullify my awareness, my consciousness
of them! Thought cannot be subject to any “laws” because it is part of the
life-world, whereas the existence of laws of thought or of nature would require
the extrapolation or extrusion of thought from the life-world. The very notion
of “law of nature” presupposes an ontological hiatus or chasm between the
stated “legality” and the object to which the “law” presumably applies! Inductive
experiences are not objective laws of nature: they are simply aspects of human
experience, of human activity or praxis. Objectively given laws of nature would
render the notions of error and knowledge meaningless because we would be unaware
of the “laws” or “reality” against which we have supposedly infringed. Knowledge
and objectivity are mutually exclusive notions! For human beings to be
capable of knowledge, the object of their knowledge cannot be independent of their “knowing” – that is
to say, we know what we do, because we decide to do it, not because our
knowledge is objective and independent of the knowing activity. All knowing
is a doing– there is no
“knowledge” independent of the activity
of knowing - verum ipsum factum (truth
is our very activity [factum, fact,
past participle of facere, Latin, to
do]).

Knowledge
is necessarily an interpretation because we only know our actions, not their
ultimate or “objective” cause. All knowledge is conjecture (Cusanus, Hobbes,
Popper). To justify our actions because
they conform with or to our knowledge is to misconstrue and to instrumentalise
this knowledge – not just the state and the use of our knowledge but also the
research that led to that knowledge. It is like justifying a shooting on
the ground that the firearm works infallibly! It is identifying knowledge with
“science” understood as “objective knowledge” and not as “scientific
enterprise”! All scientific knowledge – far from being objective – is a
“doing”, a technique, an enterprise
or project elicited by and reflecting or ex-pressing specific human aims and goals.
It is not because of the laws of physics
that we fly airplanes or can explode thermonuclear bombs: on the contrary, it
is because we have chosen to fly airplanes and to develop nuclear weapons that
we rationalize these activities – the scientific enterprise that led to them –
by means of “laws of physics” that we then fetishistically attribute to “nature”
or “reality”!

Knowing and doing
cannot be separated by treating the one as objective and the other as
subjective: both knowing and doing are aspects
of one indivisible human living activity – knowing is as much a doing as any
doing! Their separation – the distorted emphasis on the objectivity of the one
and the subjectivity of the other - can only serve pernicious political
purposes! – Which is certainly the case under capitalist social relations of
production.

Clearly, from this point
onward, it is no longer the case, with Protagoras, that “man is the measure of
all things”; instead it is the human being that becomes a mere tool, a mere
instrument used to measure “nature” or “reality”:

LII.
Such are the idols of the tribe, which arise either from the constitution of
man’s spirit, or its prejudices, or its limited faculties or restless
agitation, or from the interference of the passions, or the incompetence of the
senses, or the mode of their impressions.

In the hands of capitalist
industry, the human body becomes a mere inert tool, and one that is prone to
error and prejudice to boot! Bacon displays everywhere a breathtakingly naïve belief
in the utility and progressive nature of all tools and techniques:

II. The unassisted hand and the understanding
left to itself possess but little power. Effects are produced by the means
of instruments and helps, which the understanding requires no less than the
hand; and as instruments either promote or regulate the motions of the hand, so
those that are applied to the mind prompt or protect the understanding.

IX.
The sole cause and root of almost every defect in the sciences is this, that
while we falsely admire and extol the powers of the human mind, we do not
search for its real helps [tools].

To be sure, Bacon must have
been aware of the difficulties intrinsic to this ingenuous trust in the promise
of “science” – which as we have shown is really capitalist industry – and which
is why he put so much emphasis on the development and organization of a
scientific profession or community of scientists that would be as
democratically accountable and “public” as possible:

YetforBacontheconquestoftruths
cannotbetheworkofasingleperson,but rather thatofacollectiveofscientistsorganizedtoachievethatend.
For this reasonit hasbeenrightly stated thatmanyofthebadinterpretations
of Bacon's thoughtwouldhave been avoidedifthey had takenintoaccount the importance that he attaches
to the social factor, both at the time of the investigation and in the reference to the object of knowledge .86 From this point of view we propose here to allude to the
Baconian project of a new organization of scientific knowledge. With extreme
coherence and throughout his life, Bacon fought for an organized collectivity
of scientists financed by the
State or other entities of public utility and tried to create a kind of
international science. (Rossi, ibid.)

I
believe that to capture the real and profound distance that exists between the
positions of Bacon and the typical works of the magic and the science of the
Renaissance it is opportune to leave the ground on which we have moved so far
and to refer in its place to the valuation Bacon makes of the mechanical arts and
the interpretation of the race with the torch in honor of Prometheus we talked
about at the beginning of this chapter. Here Bacon introduced an idea of great
importance that will be placed at the center of his work of reform of learning:
in the science can only be achieved solid and positive results through

1.The mechanical arts, magic and Science 77

a chain
of researchers and of collaborative work among scientists. The methods and
operations of the mechanical arts, theircharacterofprogressand intersubjectivity,providethemodelforthenewculture85. (Rossi, ibid.)

On this ground,andonlyonthisground, originate the Baconianreserves, criticisms andoppositiontothemagic-alchemicaltradition.Thesameattitudethatwasinextricably linkedtotheseinvestigationswasattackedhereandconstituted itsbase,
that is to say,the
pretensiontotransformthetechnique [technologies]—thatforBaconiscapableofunitingmenand
of beingattheserviceofthewholehumanrace—inanartthatis
peddledasthefruitofspecialqualitiesandextraordinarypowersandbecomesthereforeanindividual'sattempt to dominateallothers.The"purification"ofmagic,subjectofwhichBaconspeaks,haspreciselythismeaning:theendsofthethreearts(magic,alchemyandastrology)arenotignoble,butthemeansthatthosethreeartsusearefullofmistakesandvanity"4.On the onehandmanmustcontinuetheproject—properofmagic—ofbecomingtheownerofnatureand of transforming it fromitsfoundationsbut,on
the other hand,mustfightthehumanidealthatmagichasassociated with that
attempt, must reject any posture that seeks to value the "enlightenment" of an individual by negating the organized effort of the whole human race and
which tends to put science at the service of a single man rather than putting
it at the service of the whole human race.

Yet,
the overriding shift away from introspection and stability/transmission/sterility
to experimentation and transformation/manufacture means that negative practical
effects are possible in terms of (a) errors and (b) evil. The outreach of
experimentation – change for its own sake or for a given purpose – means that
the human body is subject to interference conjointly, indistinguishably from
interference/analysis/intrusion on Nature! Once the absolute certainty of Truth
(truth misconstrued as certainty), the infallibility of reason and the intellect
are abandoned – due to “the will” for Descartes – a new danger emerges in that
the “truth” of empiric-inductive discovery, erected initially against the
logico-deductive Cartesian method, is turned against the human body itself
because there is no guarantee that “the search for Truth” (extrinsic scientific
methodology) will empower humans in beneficial ways!

Now
it is “the idols of the market” – capitalist manufacturing industry - that
begin to dominate Truth, or the Will to Truth, as a scientific straitjacket to
which the human body itself has to adjust! The supremacy of the scientific
method – a thinly-veiled disguise for the burgeoning interests of industrial
capitalism - is enthroned. The reality/appearance, truth/error dichotomy and,
more ominously, error/evil association prevalent in the mediaeval theocratic
order re-surfaces in new guise (cf. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals. Compare, in this regard, the title of
Ernst Mach’s seminal work, Irrtum und
Erkenntnis – where the contrast between knowledge and error becomes crucial
to the definition of science. Science is no longer seen as an activity but as
knowledge almost in a refreshed Scholastic and neo-Platonic sense.) Error is
equated not just with mistakenness but ultimately with falsehood and evil in
the sense of willful obfuscation of the Truth! To fall into error becomes
equivalent to the biblical Fall from grace. (On all this, and read in this light, the insuperable guide must be Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil where science is un-masked
as “will to truth” and then “will to power”. Heidegger’s later disquisitions on
the evils of Technik – faithfully
reprised by nobler neo-Marxist minds such as Herbert Marcuse and, generally,
the Frankfurt School – seem almost trivial in comparison.)

What
Bacon believed to be a methodical empowerment of humanity over nature was
shortly to degenerate into the subjection of humanity to an irrational and
destructive social mode of production that has pushed it together with the
ecosphere to the edge of destruction. We shall see how this great
transformation took place in our study of Thomas Hobbes’s theories of science
and of society.